Is time travel possible?

We have a winner

 

I think you could go to the past, but I don't think you could go to the future.
Based on my extremely limited knowledge of quantum theory, since the future hasn't happened yet, you don't have a place to go to.
But you could go to the past, the thing that gives you a headache, especially if you watch sci-fi, is the paradox of time travel.
Say you went to the past and killed your grandfather, since you had never been born, how could you have went to the past in the first place?
Quantum theory gets into that a little, with each decision you make splintering off into a parallel universe with you doing the opposite of what you did. So in that fashion Universe A JayFarrar could go back and kill Universe A Grandpa Sotorios, but upon U-A JayFarrar's return, it wouldn't be to U-A, it would be to U-B, and he might not return as himself but as someone else and probably right at the point of his departure since in U-B what happened after he left would be in his future and since you can't travel to the future, no time would have passed.
That assumes you could travel back and forth with a physical body and that probably isn't the case, since the energy required would be on a scale would likely be impossible to generate, but, on the other hand, I think scientists have already discovered time travel happening at a microscopic scale with quarks and other energy particles.
If you don't have a headache yet, you aren't really trying.

 

Time travel used to be possible but not so much anymore with the high gas prices. Now you have to go back to the 80s to get a decent deal on gas, and that's just too much work.

 

Not here to talk about the past.

 

Einstein seemed to suggest so, and I'm not inclined to argue with him.

Michael Crichton had some fun with the question in the novel Timeline.

 

Sure it's possible.

You don't go in no DeLorean, though. It's more like this:



(From the rather entertaining (and underrated) movie, Time after Time, with Malcolm McDowell portraying H. G. Wells).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

This guy's lawyer is on George Noory regularly.

 

Yeah, but absolutely embarassing and amateurish special effects (even for 1978), mainly consisting of reverse-negative images, kaleidoscope projections on the screen, and the like.

Definitely a movie which could stand a remake, although "Kate and Leopold" from 1997-98 or whenever it was, was pretty close to one.

Back to the main topic, time dilation, one of the byproducts of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, in fact is time travel in a forward direction. NASA confirmed, when some of the Apollo missions returned from the moon, that the astronauts and spacecraft had aged a brief fraction of a second less than people left on Earth.

 

If I understand Einstein correctly (and I don't see how that would be possible), the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time changes for you. People on earth, age at a different rate than you are aging on your "light speed ship". So you might feel you have been gone for ten years and aged appropriatley. But when you get back, those on earth have aged 70 years.

But time is duration and duration does not change for either of you does it. Crud, I have confused myself, could I get 2 doctors in her please?


You know,

a paradox.

I kill me

 

I guess you missed my thread from 2 years ago... ;D

It was titled, "My conversation with an astrophysicist."

Basically, I met a guy at a wedding who works at one of the University of California-backed labs and whose area of expertise is black holes. I asked him every 'obvious' question over an hourlong conversation.

One of those questions was time travel.

Put it this way: Not only is it possible, it's already happened. Technically.

Put that in your pipe and chew on it.

 

I call shenanigans. Thesportspredictor would have found it and bumped it by now.

 

How?